Wellspring

I have fortified my spirit 

with stones

In order to withstand the sorrow of being 

alive, sensitive, and aware.

But each rock was placed carefully as a cairn

on the ruins of my dreams.

An homage to their beauty and the color they added to the world.

They are with me;

like friends left behind on distant continents. 

And I have doggedly resisted the panicked voice inside, advising

 to build it up into a levy

so as to keep the world’s pain apart from mine.

Such an act would sever the human sacrament 

of bearing witness.

Instead it has become an aquafer, 

whose bedrock is steady even as 

the groundwater of my grief permeates everything.

When other sources run dry,

this deepest well sustains the resilient ground 

of generosity.

A riffle is springing up 

across the center of my being.

It is a space that everything must pass through.

There is refuge here;

wild things may shelter here

for a time;

and breathe.

And when I am still, I hear the rough waters

singing.

Homeostasis

We are held together by the smallest things,

The osteoblasts and myocytes,
keratin and collagen.

Nothing that is alive can grow
until it splits apart;
nor mend without a multitude
of unseen actions that come together exactly 

 right.

The intricate synergy of our own self-organizing;
The cellular orchestration of its own volition.

As long as we breathe, we evelope,

 reincarnate, and repair.  We flow with the

endlessness of order and chaos.

The healed places are knit together most

tightly, and yet they are a liability. Less

yielding, unforgetful.

Bodies are as dynamic as lives.

To rebuild is not simple nor guaranteed. It is 

fraught
with errors easy and incalculable. 

The process lasts as long as we are willing

 to continue it, or
as long as the microscopic labor 

can be sustained.

It is by those unseen cellular deeds 

that we are made alive each day. And by their grace, 

we heal.

In the forest

 In the forest I am a child.

There in the moss, I laid the weight of everyone’s tears.

Breathing in the sweet tilthy floor,

its spongey small tentacles and sharp snaps,

I was enveloped in her playful goodness.

Amidst the song sparrow and red-legged frog,

the world is still and alive.

There, the large world of my young life is smaller, but also wide.

There are no monsters to stare down. No children to save.

No one to rescue but me.

Like an elder, she surrounded me with her quiet power and granted me a stoic sanctuary.

In the forest I did not need to be brave, or strong, or good.

In the forest I am a child.

Co-evolution

Truth is intrusive, like an exposed screw that catches my loose threads,
and unravels what seemed so solid, so mendable.

We once had a dog that would fetch until it’s paws were skinless. We’d discover the wounds in shock, there was no indication he was in pain.

You say it’s like you’ve been running and discover your leg had been broken the whole time.

I think of Dr Margaret Mead explaining how a broken leg was a death sentence for our wild kin. A fossil of a healed femur shows the branching off- from a species that had to survive alone, or die; to one that was helped.

We cannot heal alone. When I say I love you, I mean that my mirror neurons fire freely at your joy and your pain.

Grief and gratitude are not a duality. They are a perfect dialectic.

Each breath is a gift, yes, but also a tether
to this fragile and tentative existence.

My best teachers taught me to return to my breath and find its softness; to let it spread through me.

To cease to breathe can also be a gift, a freeing, a small death.

We die not at once but in starts- the punctuated equilibrium of change within one lifetime,
and over eons. Each extinction we survive is a doorway
as life inexorably reinvents itself.

We can only see such a small piece of the story
to which we are inextricably bound, long after our time ends.

We can move back and forth, leaning into the uncertainty or fighting
the changes, bewildered and raw-knuckled. But one day, all that we have accumulated will be dust. Recycled, reimagined, conserved in the story.

What can we do, but meet what comes with humility, and the courage to want it all?

Noise

If you haven't put any skin in the game, stop talking.
Your voice is adding to the noise
that is obscuring the stories that must be told.
Your intellectual interest in the marginalization of others
is not contributing to our collective liberation.

If you aren’t willing to be transformed by the truth, stop talking.
The fact that you are privileged is only news to you;
you aren’t adding anything new to the conversation.
The Devil doesn't need any more Advocates
but the oppressed sure do.

If there isn't a sense of urgency for you, stop talking.
These systems of oppression serve to insulate you
from the painful injustices that uphold and perpetuate your comfort.

You want to be the Captain, but you've never put any skin in the game.

Song of ten

The oldest truth holds steady, like a center
when groundlessess is the only choice-
love is transformative.

I fell into your warmth softly,
a gravity that kept me close
until I could again meet the rough beauty of life.

The enormity of it held me in its orbit for a time
and I let go
and found a vast wilderness in the spin.

Dear one, you have never tried to tame my fierceness or lay claim;
instead you show up,
to bear witness and participate in the precariousness.

Every day with you has been precious.
Today, ten marks the years since we found ourselves on that street corner,
agape.

When faced with my own mortality,
my erratic heartbeat served only to illuminate
that you are a boundless star-filled sky,
and I am grateful to to stand, bewildered, in that light.

drift

I may have drifted,
but it was a favorable wind
and my sails were full.

My guiding light has been
curiosity
and love.

It's true that I have meandered.

An explorer,
never a conqueror.